And speaking of
legend-building, what are we to make at this distance of the epistolary spat
between Groucho and Warner Brothers? It’s the thing everyone most remembers
about the movie and most celebrates it for; you can find it in The Groucho Letters and just about every
book ever written on the team and their movies. The story (as reported in the New York Times of May 20, 1945 and
elsewhere) goes that Warner Brothers peevishly and absurdly lodged formal
opposition to the use of the word ‘Casablanca’ in the film’s title. So Groucho
sent them a hilarious letter spoofing their pretensions and questioning their
right to call themselves Brothers, as the Marxes got there first. They replied
even more officiously and without the smallest awareness they were being
kidded, so Groucho replied even more sarcastically; they wrote again; he
replied again.
All very funny. But is
it true?
Clearly, the exchange
was of enormous publicity value for the film, and was immediately utilised to
that end: a larky announcement released to the trades claimed that the Brothers
would shortly be seen in “Adventures in
Casablanca, or The Night in
Casablanca, or A Night in Casablanca,
or One Night in Casablanca, or It Happened One Night in Casablanca, or
anything the mayors of Casablanca (Warner Brothers) will permit!”. But if they
were used as publicity, could they
have been devised as publicity?
Remember, the official story is that the objection from Warners came first, and
that Groucho merely responded. What actually happened is that the idea there may be a possible copyright violation
was planted in the Hollywood gossip columns in a deliberate effort to get
Warners to take the bait.
In a syndicated piece
by Earl Wilson, published on June 3, 1945, Groucho uncannily anticipates, as if
with second sight, the future course of events: “Groucho said that inasmuch as
Humphrey Bogart has already made a picture about Casablanca, he felt he should
call himself Humphrey Bogus in his film. But maybe, he said, Warner Brothers
will refuse to permit that. In that case, the Marx Brothers would have to ask
the Warners not to call themselves Warner Brothers any more, as they would be
usurping the word Brothers.” ‘Maybe’, indeed. Exactly one week later it was,
apparently, speculation no longer, as the Montreal
Gazette and others announced: ‘Battle Over Name Casablanca Causes Flurry in Film Capital.’ Now, it was claimed, the
“latest developments” in the affair “were being watched by the entire motion
picture industry,” and Loew is quoted as saying, “There is no logical reason
why Warners can claim for all time the exclusive use of Casablanca, just because it was fortunate in having a picture by
that title at the time the Allies staged a conference in that city.”
Another piece syndicated in November claims that “an arbitration board” (nice
and specific!) has ruled in Loew’s favour, and here again is what it generously
calls a ‘facetious crack’ from Groucho (already facetiously cracked and
published at least once earlier in the year, and, says the legend, already the
signed and delivered text of a facetious letter): “I’ll sue Warners and demand
that they desist from calling themselves brothers on the grounds that the
Marxes established prior rights to that title.” (The Motion Picture Daily of November 15, 1945, likewise reporting the
victory, has it decided by “an arbitration board sitting in New York”. Don’t
these boards have names?)
But the sharp-eyed might spot that these reports all have one striking thing in
common: none contains so much as a breath
of a statement, or even acknowledgement, from Warners themselves. As
Groucho confessed in a letter to his friend Dr Samuel Salinger, who had
remarked upon one such story around this time: “We spread the story that
Warners objected to this story purely for publicity reasons. They may
eventually actually object to it, although I don’t think so… At any rate, the
publicity has been wonderful on it and it was a happy idea. I wish they would
sue, but as it is, we’ve had reams in the papers.”
So instead of an out-of-the-blue communication from a humourless Warners
stooge, what we may actually have is a studio carefully targeted and goaded
into response. And if they did, this could well have been after the first Groucho letter. The first need not be read as a
response to a prior communication: it might just as easily have been sent
unprompted, in spurious response to these reports of Warners’ displeasure that
the Marxes and Loew had themselves cooked up and planted in the papers.
Whereupon Groucho could have proceeded as planned, firing off a series of
facetious letters to which Warners responded uncomprehendingly.
This much I insist
upon, as minimum. But what if even that
sober reduction of the legend is too generous? What if those uncomprehending
Warner replies never did arrive as hoped for, and claimed? What if there was,
at most, one perfectly reasonable request for clarification – or even none at all? (The third Groucho
letter certainly reads as if there had been no response to the previous one,
beginning, “Since I last wrote you…”)
Note that all the books
that quote Groucho’s supposed responses at considerable length only ever
paraphrase the replies from Warners, and incredibly vaguely at that. The source
of the information they all rely upon seems to be The Groucho Letters itself, where they are also paraphrased. So
where are these letters now? Who signed them? Do Warners not still have copies
in their files? Why aren’t they reproduced, even in extract, alongside
Groucho’s contributions to the debate in The
Groucho Letters? Or anywhere? Ever? (And the only reason why I’m consenting
to ambivalence about the possibility of there having been even one letter from Warners is because
although the fact that it, too, is never quoted is most likely because it too never existed, I suppose it might also be that the quoting of the
one would make it even more obvious that nobody was then quoting the
non-existent others.) Do we even know if Groucho’s letters were sent to
Warners, rather than just to the papers on that pretext? They are, you’ll
notice, the only missives in the entirety of The Groucho Letters not to be dated. Why, it’s almost as if they were never really sent…
I have one other reason
for not believing a single damned word of this saga, and as hinted earlier it
concerns the mystery man of our story, producer David Loew. I don’t know if
Loew was a genuine rogue or not, but the more I have looked into his career the
more I am convinced of this: he was a showman prankster worthy of comparison
with Kroger Babb, William Castle or P.T. Barnum himself.
Those familiar with the
background to A Night in Casablanca
will recall the popular story that Harpo was offered $55,000 to say the word
“Murder!” in the film, but with admirable professional integrity turned down
the whopping sum. Though taken seriously in most accounts of the film, this was
a wheeze entirely typical of its author. Loew’s outré publicity schemes were
many and inspired, but perhaps by virtue of his MGM royal blood, nobody seemed
to connect the dots between them, and he appears never to have acquired any
personal reputation as a flimflam man.
I’ve added a few
general examples of his inventive publicity stunts to the notes section at the
end of the book, but the important thing to note as far as Casablanca is concerned is just how many of them involve Loew
seemingly being compelled to respond to complaints, petitions, and threats of
legal proceedings.
The all all-time
classic in this regard must be the ‘strip picket’ affair, which unfolded before
a rapt Hollywood in November of 1940. On the afternoon of November 25, a
little-known actress called Gerta Rozan, who had been hired to appear in one
scene of a Loew epic called So Ends Our
Night and had supposedly discovered at a preview the weekend before that
her scene had been cut, startled passers-by outside the office of Loew and his
then-partner Albert Lewin by calmly removing her blouse. She returned the
following day, before a loitering crowd and several lanes of stalled traffic,
and removed her skirt. “Today, her slip is scheduled to go,” hyperventilated
the Victoria Advocate on the 27th. A
placard that she carried with her read: “DON’T SEE ‘SO ENDS OUR NIGHT’ –
LOEW-LEWIN UNFAIR TO GERTA ROZAN”. “She intends to remove an extra layer of
clothing every day until her part is restored,” explained Frederick Othman,
with great beads of perspiration forming on his forehead and dripping on to his
notepad, in the Milwaukee Journal.
“And if this doesn’t take my face off the cutting room floor then I’ll just
take off some more tomorrow,” added Rozan (in “her flimsiest chiffon brassiere
and laciest panties”). Quite coincidentally, of course, “it was the sexiest
love scene in the picture.” What were the odds! Loew carefully fanned the
flames, somehow keeping a straight face as he complained she was “heaping
ridicule upon the producers of a serious and profound motion picture.” On the
third day, supposedly unable to take any more provocation (“We’re not getting
our work done,” Loew complained to the credulous pencil-chewers), Loew and
Lewin put a coat over her and took her inside, promising to either restore the
scene or give her a part in their next picture, or both. For three days, Loew
had achieved saturation coverage, got the name of his forthcoming film seen in
every paper, and spread the word that it would now include for definite a hot love scene featuring a girl the nation had just
seen parading up and down in her underwear. A pretty girl holding a banner
saying ‘See So Ends Our Night’ might
have secured a little coverage on a slow news day. Loew had the banner say ‘Don’t see So Ends Our Night’ - and owned the papers for three days running.
The publicity value of
creating a phony complaint and then defiantly addressing it seems suddenly to
have become a preoccupation of Loew’s in 1945, beginning in June with the
staging of Warner Brothers’ objection to A
Night in Casablanca.
To be the victim of one
legal challenge against a seemingly innocuous Marx Brothers film may be
unfortunate, to incur a second looks like carelessness – or contrivance - but
that’s what Loew would have you believe happened. At one point in the film,
Groucho and Lisette Verea blow smoke at each other (in what future generations
may need convincing is only a slight exaggeration of a once genuine human
courtship ritual), and the result, Groucho opines, is “like living in
Pittsburgh.” According to the Gettysburg
Times, William B. McFall, president of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce,
and F. E. Schuchman, president of the Civic Club of Allegheny County,
officially petitioned Loew to have the line removed. United Artists released a
fatuous statement (“If they feel that Pittsburgh is a smoky city, it’s not only
their right but their bounden duty to say so”), and to nobody’s surprise the
newspaper’s headline was: ‘WISECRACK WILL REMAIN IN FILM’. A pattern seems to
be forming here…
Then we have Loew and Albert Lewin’s production of The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. This one attracted the supposed
wrath of America’s womanhood in December, on account that it threatened to be
the third George Sanders film (after The
Moon and Sixpence, also from Loew and Lewin, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, also from Lewin) to feature the actor
dispensing a stream of misogynistic bon mots. Loew’s would-be nemesis this
time: Mrs J. D. Cahn, president of the New York City Associated Women’s Clubs.
“We have all intentions of boycotting the film,” she wrote, “should the
original plan of slander upon women be continued,” but Loew, as ever, bravely
held firm… Actually he and Lewin had already used the ‘annoying women’ tactic
on The Moon and Sixpence in 1942 (‘Moon and Sixpence Angers Women But
They’ll Like Film, Say Authors’ was the headline in the Miami News), but that time they hadn’t gone so far as to goad (or
load) some likely dupe into making an actual complaint. As always, the
headlines did the job.
The odd one out among these is Loew’s apparent battle over the partial banning
of his production of Jean Renoir’s The
Southerner, because it’s almost impossible to believe it wasn’t genuine.
Lloyd T. Binford, head of the Memphis censors board, had long enjoyed a
reputation – without any help from Loew – for banning outright or drastically
cutting Hollywood movies so as to protect the delicate sensibilities of the
South. (“Mostly,” as The Age noted in
1953, when the now 86 year old Binford was still very much at it, “he cracks
down on pictures that attempt to show racial equality.”) The Southerner was just one of many to have incurred his
displeasure, this time because it “pictures the Southern farmer as squalid,
ignorant white trash,” and he declared it banned in August. Loew issued his
usual challenge, and Binford seemingly backed down. It’s hard to believe this
one was set up, given Binford’s uncompromising nature, though the coincidence
in that case - given that it occurred after Casablanca
and before Bel Ami – would be
extraordinary. Somehow, I wouldn’t put it past him (and I’ve tentatively
developed one possible argument for concluding that this was indeed another
scam in the notes section).
You’ll notice that in
most of the above cases, real people with real names are cited, and their
co-operation presumably secured. But it was much harder – and riskier – to play
a presumably one-handed game against a mighty behemoth like Warner Brothers. If
he was making allegations of belligerence that were not true, that would surely
be to risk serious repercussions if they decided to call his bluff.
And why, for that
matter, didn’t they? I don’t know. All I know is that another of those odd
little coincidences happened next.
With A Night in Casablanca in the final
stages and Loma Vista ready for dissolution, Loew turned his attention to the
forming of his next fly-by-night outfit. Announced to the press in March of
1946, Enterprise Productions was still another collaboration of disparate
types, including David Lewis, former personal assistant to Irving Thalberg, and
the usual surprise name from in front of the cameras (in this case actor John
Garfield). By August they were announcing the coup of having lured Norma
Shearer from retirement (presumably at the inducement of Lewis). As usual, that
was the last anybody heard of that. Their big premier release, Arch of Triumph (1948) was released
through United Artists, who declared it “probably the greatest commercial failure in the
history of motion pictures,” despite some typical Loew moonshine before
release about the studio having to fight off efforts to tone down the sizzling
love scenes. By August of 1948 (according to the Montreal Gazette) Enterprise had dropped their lease on the studio
space they had been renting, and released a statement announcing that they
would not be releasing statements announcing anything much for the time being.
And by November, Hedda Hopper is speaking enigmatically but somehow tellingly
of “the late, unlamented Enterprise Studios.” Why ‘unlamented’? Was the
Hollywood grapevine getting wise to the ways of its head honcho and tiring of
being played like the proverbial flute? Just as intriguingly, David Loew, she
tells us, “has one plan for the future – to lie Loew.” The short life and quick
death of a typical David Loew production outfit.
But what has this to do with A Night in
Casablanca? Well, back when Enterprise was new and the reports positive,
much of the press interest had surrounded the fourth main player in the outfit
after Loew, Lewis and Garfield. According to Loew’s carefully managed reports,
he got talking to one Charles Einfeld at a party, and they hit it off. “Why
don’t we go into business together?” asked Loew. “Why not?” replied Einfeld. And
it all happened as simply as that, if the Spokane
Daily Chronicle et al are to be believed. Well, maybe it did. But remember,
Night in Casablanca fans, this is all
happening in the early months of 1946. What had Charles Einfeld been doing
hitherto? What secure position was he willing to throw away, just to enter into
uncertain partnership with Loew, so impressed with him had he been after an
evening’s chat at a Hollywood party? Turns out he was Vice President in charge
of advertising and publicity at Warner Brothers...
Might he have been the source of that one possible communication from the
studio asking for clarification over copyright? Or might Loew even have courted
him from the first, tempting him to go along with his publicity caper, and not
spoil it all with counter-claims and calls for retraction, even if annoying the
studio with whom he would in any event soon part company, only to magically
reappear as a key player in Loew’s latest enterprise? It’s all credit to David
Loew that even after I’ve chased him around the historical record everywhere I
could find him, following this project here, that company there, down each and
every rabbit hole of distraction and obfuscation… I still wouldn’t like to say
for sure.
Before we leave this
slippery web, one final bit of wild conjecture that for once does not directly
involve the mischievous Mr Loew. Could there have been a secondary motive to
all this on the Marxes’ part, besides publicity? Note first the curious coincidence
that within the year Chico would be suing Warner Brothers for real, claiming
that he had been “deeply humiliated” by having his name used without permission
in the film Rhapsody In Blue.
According to which report you want to go with, he was particularly hurt either
because “he was quoted in the picture as endorsing certain piano-playing
techniques which he did not approve”, or because “the film gave the impression
that he once played piano in a theatre in a cheap neighbourhood.” (The very
idea!) According to the Independent
Exhibitors Film Bulletin of March 18, 1946, he was also claiming Warners
owed him $100,000 for “services rendered”, something of which the studio had
“no recollection”. Either way, he was intent on sticking it to them for 200,000
big ones. In February of ’48 a court duly awarded him $10,000, which was likely
on Sun Up’s nose by the following morning, but by April some pesky Sig Rumann
of a judge ruled the evidence insufficient and ordered a retrial. When the Bulletin pondered if the suit might be
“a return” for Warners’ unhelpfulness over Casablanca
it made the mistake of not realising just how beneficial that episode had
been (the key to understanding its true nature) but in raising the general
issue of revenge, it may not have been barking up the wrong tree after all.
Note this revelation from an interview with Bob Thomas in the Reading Eagle and elsewhere of April 5,
1946:
Harpo tells me that two or three years ago Chico was playing
a Warner Brothers theatre in Pittsburgh when he fell ill. Harpo flew from
Hollywood to fill out the engagement. Nevertheless, says Harpo, Chico was fined
$2000 by the theater for not filling the date. So when Harpo heard Chico
mentioned in Rhapsody in Blue he
persuaded his brother to sue for damages because Warners did not get permission
to use the name.
So, given all that,
might the phony Casablanca war too have been, partially at least, another front
in the same campaign, its purpose primarily to keep the gossip columns singing
the Marxes’ tune, but also to annoy Warners, make them look foolish and, if
possible, goad them into wasting money on a futile breach of copyright suit?
Whatever the truth of
the matter, the last laugh was ultimately on everyone: copyright being a fickle
limpet, the film is now issued on DVD by – yes, madam, you guessed it – Warner
Brothers.
